Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
Religious Discourse and Tribal Affiliation in Early Islamic Ifrīqiya
- Date
- Thursday 15 February 2024
- Time
- Series
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2024
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
Early Islamic Ifrīqiya is often depicted as a bastion of Maliki Sunnism, whose jurists presented a united opposition to the Shi’ism of the Fatimid rulers in the 4th/10th century. This talk will argue that this homogeneity is largely a later construction and that the religious discourse of 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th-century Ifrīqiya was characterized by considerable legal and doctrinal diversity.
It will relate this diversity to the changing social and political landscape of the province and, in particular, to the lines of tribal affiliation that demarcated the different waves of Arab settlers. The development of an Ifrīqiyan religious identity should be understood against this socio-political background and in relation to the province’s proximity to al-Andalus and Egypt.
Antonia Bosanquet
Antonia Bosanquet is assistant professor in Ancient History and Classical Civilization at the University of Utrecht, where she specializes in Islamic law and the Maghrib in the early Islamic period. She uses legal texts to understand the social history of this region and is particularly interested in religious change and the effect of migration on culture formation. Her first book was on the relation between anti-Semitism and feminism in the thought of the Islamist Muḥammad Quṭb and her second book was about the regulation of Jews and Muslims in Islamic legal texts of the 8th/14th century. She earned her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin and worked at the RomanIslam Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies before coming to Utrecht.